This is a selection of the 100 most common nouns in modern American English. It was adapted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), an extensive body of 450,000,000 words. To see more information about this excellent corpus or other resources from Brigham Young University, head to their COCA website.

1. time
2. year
3. people
4. way
5. day
6. man
7. thing
8. woman
9. life
10. child
11. world
12. school
13. state
14. family
15. student
16. group
17. country
18. problem
19. hand
20. part
21. place
22. case
23. week
24. company
25. system
26. program
27. question
28. work
29. government
30. number
31. night
32. point
33. home
34. water